... I've been over at Boing Boing, editing the guest blog. Feel free to visit.

Yet another SF-related link: this article explains, in the author's words, "How I was politically educated by The Prisoner". A thought-provoking look at a fascinating TV series and the way it put over a number of interesting politically- charged points at the height of the cold war.

Event Horizon interviewed Vernor Vinge in 1999 about his recent novels, the Singularity, and all sorts of interesting background stuff. If you're interested in current directions in SF and haven't read it, the interview is still on the web.

Some companies expect their employees to give an arm and a leg, but this is just taking the piss. (Er, or something like that ...)

The War on Drugs has a long casualty list, but recent relaxation of the ban on cannabis in the UK has claimed some unexpected victims, according to The Guardian.

Much to my becrogglement, I just learned that my short story collection TOAST is, like, going to the printer tomorrow.

More details as and when they become available. Okay?

Feorag's made the Independant on Sunday, this time. (Scottish edition, again.)

I suppose I should explain.

We're members of the Edinburgh naturist swimming club, abunch of people who, well, hire a swimming pool so they can swim around with no clothes on.

A month ago, for a laugh, a couple of members of the club committee proposed doing a 2002 calendar. Being a naturistclub, obviously the club calendar would have to featurevarious members -- wearing lots of clothes.

In the fullness of time, the Evening News (who had previously run a feature about the club) send a photographer round, for a laugh and a human interest story. Feorag was among the club members who showed up.

Then The Sun picked up on the story and ran with it ("Naturist club calendar cover-up"). Then the Indy picked it up.

Where's it all going to end?

In 1949, playwright Harold Pinter was attacked by neo-nazi thugs on the streets of London.

Newly declassified Home Office documents covering the investigation show that the government of the day was more worried about the Communist Threat than about nazi thugs beating up its own citizens; his complaints to the police were dismissed as nonsense and the Home Office spent more time investigating the National Council for Civil Liberties for 'subversion' than dealing with violent thugs in their own capital city.

So I trust you'll take me seriously when I say that right now, as I speak, Feorag is all over page three of The Sun.

(At least, the Scottish edition -- she's not in the English version.)

Note for non-UK readers: page three of The Sun is reserved for topless bimbos. Just what she's doing there wearing a t-shirt, leggings, and sunglasses I leave to your imagination.

All will be explained tomorrow ...

For the last year, The Register has been tracking the entertainment lobby's attempts to get CPRM copy prevention built into all ATA standard hard disk drives.

The music and film industry is in big trouble, and they've got a vested interest in preventing digital copying because it drives the cost of their core commodity towards zero. (Forget the fact that 80% of the revenue from films comes in the form of merchandise and spin-off rights; these guys are totalitarian in their outlook, and none more so than the music industry who have neatly set things up as a supply-side monopoly and don't want cheap MP3 copying to disrupt the money pipeline.)

This article, by Hale Landis, is still valid, and it explains exactly what the core of the MPAA/RIAA strategy is: the total destruction of the general-purpose computer as we know it.

PC's are just too damn flexible to coexist with distribution monopolies, it seems, so the strategy is to push the big manufacturers towards making closed boxes (like the early Macintosh -- thank you, Steve Jobs) and bundling closed 'secure' (for whom?) operating systems on top of them. Software patents and 'trade secret' lawsuits can then be used to sue those pesky free software people into shutting down the sites that distribute their software, and closed hardware architecture will make it impossible for mere users to get at the underlying devices and use them for things like unrestricted and unfiltered data i/o.

This whole plan is completely insane, but there are worrying signs that it may be working. Remember: what they can't steal by stealth, they'll steal by passing a law to say that it isn't stealing (and trying to hold on to your rights is depriving them of their legally mandated source of income).

Feorag's started a blog. Okay, it's actually an online version of her 'zine, Pagan Prattle, which she's published irregularly for the past 15 years or so (and which is neither pagan nor prattle, if you ask me). If you're into Loony Fundamentalist Nonsense, as Feorag is, go read.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation campaigns almost entirely on US legal issues relating to civil liberties and the internet. Why am I, living in Scotland, a member?

Some of the answers are here, in this article by rusty on Kuro5hin, the thinking geek's uber-Slashdot site. But those only cover what the EFF does, not why it's important to non-Americans.

The reason is important, but not exactly simple: what passes into law in the USA seems to get echoed at the next WIPO treaty session in the form of an international agreement, which gets passed into law in the EU and then the UK shortly thereafter. Because UK citizens don't generally get consulted about international treaties while they're being negotiated, we have a lot less chance of avoiding bad agreements once they've been passed by WIPO than we do if they're blocked there, first. If a law gets rejected by US legislators, the odds are that it won't get passed by WIPO -- at least, not easily.

We are already living under a de-facto world government; it's a free trade system controlled by international treaty organisations, and it's not a democracy. The only people who can afford to lobby their 'representatives' are big corporations or lobbying groups who can afford to fly around the diplomatic circuit at will. I view political lobbying in the US as being a pre-emptive strike against bad legislation in the UK. This situation sucks, but short of applying for US citizenship or tearing down the whole treaty system (returning the world to the state it was in in 1933) there's no obvious way to change it.

So, even if you're not American, think hard about supporting the EFF. Who knows? It may be your interests they're defending, tomorrow.

Cory Doctorow's written an editorial on O'Reilly.net in which he discusses the root causes of corporate disillusionment with the internet, and where the next revolution will come from. Provocative and worth reading even if you think you know it all. Elevator summary: the internet is unreliable, this doesn't fit with corporate assumptions about marketing, so the old-fashioned businesses have caught cold. (New businesses that can cope with unreliability and peer to peer equality are a different matter.)

... is one of these.

Unfortunately they're just a theoretical possibility at this stage, but when you take the old HitchHiker's catch-phrase "brain the size of a planet" seriously and start extrapolating towards the limits of computation achievable using nanotechnology and the energy of a single star, this is what you get: a Matrioshka Brain is a Dyson Sphere on steroids.

If you buy Hans Moravec's estimate of the computational complexity of a human mind, and assume that mind uploading is possible, a single Matrioshka Brain gives you the ability to host as many human-equivalent minds as you'd get if every single star in our galaxy had an inhabited planet with the population of the Earth in 2001 orbiting it. Alternatively, a single MB could re-run the life and consciousness of every human being who has ever lived in simulation in about half an hour.

Of course, a Matrioshka Brain is a piss-poor computer when compared to a neuron star (no, that's not a typo), but we don't really know how to structure strange matter yet. Doubtless when we've built an MB it'll figure it all out in the first ten minutes or so.

I'm just astounded that these concepts haven't caught on among SF writers yet. Maybe they're too big, or something?

They Fight Crime!